This course is intermediate microeconomics for undergraduate students. The course starts by analyzing the behavior of consumers and producers, and then extends the discussion to how individual decisions and market interacts, how market structures affect price and welfare, and under what circumstances market can fail in maximizing social welfare. This course also discusses other classical microeconomic topics such as game theory and information economics. We also cover the frontier research topics in microeconomics such as behavioral economics. In terms of the basic logic, this course starts from rationality assumption, and discusses how utility maximization, the basic method of economics, can be applied in analyzing individual decisions, and what are the limitation of the classical assumption. This course will use certain amount of algebra and calculus, but we will emphasize on the intuition and graphic illustrations.
Assessment: homework 30%, final exam 70%.